Fiber optic rings have been installed, and as of 1999 are in the process of being installed in many cities. These communication networks have the potential to provide low cost, high bandwidth connections within a geographical area of several miles, as well as low cost, high bandwidth connections to other communication networks, such as the Internet. To date, however, the equipment available for providing data communications over these networks has been sufficiently expensive that relatively little use is being made of these fiber optic networks.
The present invention provides a low cost system architecture that allows Fibre Channel (FC) and Gigabit Ethernet (GE) data streams to be seamlessly routed through such fiber optic ring networks with very high reliability, all while making efficient use of the available bandwidth.